“Who Represents The Innocents?”

Sorious Samura almost lost his heart in Liberia. After he was detained in 2000 on bogus espionage charges by soldiers loyal to then President Charles Taylor, they threatened to cut it out and eat it. “And they would do it,” says Samura, an acclaimed Sierra Leonean documentary filmmaker now living in London. “I thought I’d be history by now.” Instead, international pressure won the release of Samura and three colleagues after they’d spent a week in a Monrovia prison.

Samura, 41, repeatedly risks his life to document the suffering of his fellow Africans. His debut, Out of Africa (Cry Freetown), a harrowing account of the victims of civil war in his native country, established him as a voice for the continent’s too-often forgotten masses. “Who represents the innocents?” he asks. “Who is telling their story? I want to represent them.”

That mission has brought him most recently to the Sudan-Chad border. His latest project: an Insight News Television film to be broadcast later this year that will show the world what it is like to be a refugee there. More than 1.2 million people in Sudan’s Darfur Province in the west have been driven from their homes by militia attacks; an estimated 50,000 have been killed. “Everybody was busy looking at how the peace talks were going between the government and the [southern] rebels,” says Samura. “Nobody was looking at Darfur. And today that ignorance has cost the lives of God knows how many thousands in the villages, by helicopter gunships, by men with machetes. It is this that decent journalism should represent.”

One of nine children in a poor family in Freetown, Samura was sent to an English-speaking Christian school, where he began to realize that drama was a good way to get political messages across. While working as an assistant theater manager in the late 1980s, he found a digital video camera and taught himself to use it. He was soon documenting events and assisting film crews from abroad, before traveling to Leeds Metropolitan University for formal training in camera work, editing techniques and scriptwriting.

At times Samura had trouble getting his material broadcast because television executives found it too graphically violent. In early 1999, when rebel forces entered Freetown, he ignored their threats and filmed many of the atrocities they committed — including chopping off hands. He eventually left the rebel lines and went on to film beatings and executions of some of the rebels’ alleged supporters at the hands of the Nigerian-led forces sent into Sierra Leone as peacekeepers. Some of his footage was shown by the bbc, and Samura won a prestigious Rory Peck Award for freelance journalists. At the awards ceremony in London that October, Samura told the chiefs of British television news: “You guys are clapping me for showing you pictures of my people killing each other. But where were you? Why didn’t you go there? … I didn’t put my life on the line for an award or for money. Take your award back if you want, but go there, go to Sierra Leone.” They responded with a standing ovation — and financial support. Four broadcasting outlets soon gave him funding to return to Sierra Leone and make his powerful documentary debut. He followed with Return to Freetown, showing how a rebel leader’s greed for diamonds and power made killers of thousands of abducted children; Exodus, which followed West African migrants on their hazardous journeys of hope across the Sahara and then the Mediterranean to Spain; and last year’s Living With Hunger (Surviving Hunger), in which Samura lived for a month in a hut in a remote Ethiopian village, sharing the meager diet of the other villagers.

“I see the people as real heroes. I see them doing a lot for themselves,” Samura says. But, he adds, the West must make a sustained commitment to Africa to put into place solutions to the continent’s innumerable problems — especially hiv, poverty, official corruption and a lack of basic infrastructure. “We need the West to help us find hope,” he says. Otherwise, desperate refugees and asylum seekers will continue to risk their lives to reach Europe. “We will come. It doesn’t matter if they electrify the seas. We will come.” Adds Samura: “I want to grow old in Africa. I want my children to go there. That is home.” With apologies to Charles Taylor’s thugs, Sierra Leone is where Samura’s heart is.